Intended for both newcomers who are curious about video games and experienced gamers who want to reflect on their passion, this course will explore what happens to stories, paintings, and films when they become the basis of massively multiplayer online games. The Lord of the Rings trilogy—the novels, films, and video game—are our central example of how “remediation” transforms familiar stories as they move across media.
The course is designed as a university-level English literature class—a multi-genre, multimedia tour of how literature, film, and games engage in the basic human activity of storytelling. Our journey will enable us to learn something about narrative theory, introduce us to some key topics in media studies and cover some of the history and theory of video games. It will also take us to some landmarks of romance literature, the neverending story that lies behind most fantasy games: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, a bit of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and poems by Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and others.
Drawing on centuries of romance narrative conventions, the twenty-first century gaming industry has become a creative and economic powerhouse. It engages the talents of some of our brightest writers, artists, composers, computer engineers, game theorists, video producers, and marketing professionals, and in 2012, it generated an estimated $64 billion in revenue. Anyone interested in today’s culture needs to be conversant with the ways this new medium is altering our understanding of stories. Join me as we set out on an intellectual adventure, the quest to discover the cultural heritage of online games.

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The Holy Grail: A Good End Game

Since Aristotle, the one constant in the study of narrative has been the analysis of beginnings, middles, and ends. As is appropriate for our last week, we spend much of our time examining how Tolkien takes leave of his readers at the end of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. The final stage of MMOs--when your character has maxed out and completed all the quests--has always presented challenges to game makers. Although LOTRO continues to take us on our journey toward Mordor, it cannot escape the challenge of creating end-game material for advanced players. We look at two attempts to include advanced players in the events of Western Rohan and Helm's Deep. Finally, we ponder what comes after the end, as we read Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem, "Ulysses." ***For details about this week's Readings, go to the Syllabus page in your Resources tab.